October/November 2002 
A Look Back at The AWP Newsletter, The AWP Chronicle, The Writer's Chronicle
AWP Staff
The novelist is lucky to find characters whose names are unalterably their own, whose names cannot be changed even if their author wills it. Such names may appear spectrally, as Wharton's did; or be elusive at first, like Beattie's. They may be downright uncooperative, like Didion's. But once the author has their real names, such characters stand and deliver.
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Cheer Up, Why Don't You?
Debra Spark
In the wake of last September's tragedy-9/11, the emergency already built in-several news venues spoke of the need for consolation in art. and elsewhere. I drive a long way, 140 miles round-trip, to work. When I come home, the apolitical whirlwind that is a two-year-old, keeps me focused on the most mundane of concerns.
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A Conversation with Dorothy Allison
Renée Olander
Dorothy Allison's books include two novels, Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award, Cavedweller (Dutton 1998), a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (Dutton 1995), a meditation on memoir and storytelling.
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A Test of Translation: The First Strophe of Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Clayton Eshleman
I would like to engage the translation of poetry by scrutinizing the charged opening strophe of Cesaire's Notebook. I will first comment on some of the strophe's key words and present Annette Smith's and my translation. I will then consider two differing translations of this strophe: the first is from John Berger and Anna Bostock's translation of the Notebook (Penguin Books, 1969); the second is by Emile Snyder, from his version of the Notebook (Presence Africaine, Paris, 1971).
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Fact, Dream, and Labor: Robert Frost and the New New England Attitude
Sydney Lea
I have a beloved neighbor somewhat south of here, a woman of 80 who lives in the house where she was born. Ruthie had to end her schooling in the eighth grade and go to work; in my family's company, she visited Boston for the only time in her life, and she has never seen another city. She is, in short, a provincial in the purely descriptive sense of that term.
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Public Literature, Private Poetry: An Interview with Jason Shinder
Sara Anne Johnson
Jason Shinder grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Merrick, Long Island, and earned a BA degree from Skidmore College and an MA from University of California at Davis. In 1981, he founded the YMCA Writer's Voice in New York City, the flagship center of the first and now largest network of independent literary arts centers in the country.
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Remembering Eudora Welty
Richard Bausch
One evening not so long ago, I was present at a gathering in the Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. It was late October, and there was a crispness in the air, the trees lining the avenues were all blazing with color. Though the occasion was decidedly secular rather than religious, it was certainly spiritual: Miss Eudora Welty, then 86 years old, was going to read one of her stories.
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